Strategie combinate per la cattura della CO2 e l’ottimizzazione dell’accumulo ibrido di energia, inclusa la gestione microbica e la metagenomica

Biological carbon capture and utilization technologies represent a promising avenue to support sustainable decarbonization in the coming decades. In particular, microbially driven conversion processes enable the transformation of gaseous waste streams (e.g., biogas, industrial off-gases, combustion gases) into biofuels via methanogenesis, or into value-added compounds through acetogenesis and specialized biosynthetic pathways (e.g., glyoxylate shunt, Wood–Ljungdahl pathway). These chemolithotrophic microorganisms operate within complex consortia. Despite advances in meta-omics, our understanding of their metabolic division of labor, interactions within and between guilds, and connections to process performance remains limited. Furthermore, prophages exert a pivotal influence on these ecosystems by shaping microbial community structure, modulating population dynamics, and affecting process efficiency through lytic and lysogenic cycles. Another overlooked dimension is the genetic heterogeneity of microbiomes, which strongly contributes to their ecological stability. Under perturbation, selective pressure acts on microbial populations by favoring the appearance of de novo mutations and the generation of novel haplotypes. Considering these aspects, carbon-fixing microbiota remain only partially characterized, yet they represent a vast and largely untapped biological resource that deserves to be explored.